BEING CONSCIOUS IS SOMETHING'S BEING ACTUAL -- WHAT AND HOW?   by Ted Honderich This piece, now a little revised, is reflection in preparation for lectures in the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sussex, and Bath. It conveys the sequence and general content of an argument for a different answer to the question of what it is to be conscious. The piece is new, but not what is still to come, a completed articulation in a book. That will include second and no doubt third thoughts, not to mention more scholarship. Abstract: The philosophy and science of consciousness is a melee of disagreement. Is this owed to the lack of an adequate initial clarification of the subject, ordinary consciousness in the primary sense? Is there a clarification in five leading ideas about consciousness? They are of qualia, something it is like to be something, subjectivity, intentionality or aboutness, two kinds of consciousness. There is no initial clarification here. But there are many converging thoughts and impulses of importance. What they come to is that being conscious is something's being actual. Of course that is as metaphorical as beginnings of theory and research in the history of science. The main criteria of adequacy for a theory of consciousness must be that it gives literal answers to two questions. What is actual? How or in what sense actual? Other criteria from reflection on existing theories of consciousness, e.g. abstract and physical functionalism, include the difference-in-kind of consciousness, its subjectivity, reality, and causality. (1) What is actual with your perceptual consciousness now is a room, and nothing else whatever, e.g. content in some other sense, qualia or representation. (2) What it is for it to be actual is only for a room to exist out there in a defined sense -- to be spatio-temporal etc. This externalism with perceptual consciousness is more radical than the meaning-externalisms of Putnam and Burge. But an account  partly internalist of reflective and affective consciousness is as essential. In sum the theory of Actualism is a naturalism and a subjective physicalism. Was ordinary consciousness the right subject, or a right subject to begin with? Yes. 1  ORDINARY CONSCIOUSNESS -- AN INITIAL CLARIFICATION NEEDED?     In general, what is it for anything to be conscious in the ordinary sense that is primary? And, in particular, what is it to be each of perceptually conscious, reflectively conscious or affectively conscious. What is it, say, for you to be aware now of the room you're in, or thinking a thought from this sentence, or maybe wanting to be somewhere else?     What follows is a sketch of a book's argument for certain answers. Also a certain answer to the mind-body question or questions -- the relation of consciouness to its basis or bases. A few words, too, on whether ordinary consciousness as understood is the right subject for inquiry. Not everybody thinks so.     We each have a hold or grip on our own ordinary consciousness in the primary sense, an acquaintance in immediate recollection. (Cf Siewert 1998, 4-6; Georgalis) We also have a commonsensical definition on our consciousness, including necessary conditions such as not being knocked out, and its somehow being about things. (Block, 1995a/1997/2007, 380 in 1997; Lycan, 1996, 1-5; Guzeldere, 1997, 6-8; Searle, 2002, 21; Levine, 2003, 57) Has the lack of something better, an initial clarification of this consciousness, first rough necessary and sufficient conditions, but not yet an analytical theory, resulted in the melee of disagreement, much incomprehension, hopefully announced consensus and some condescension in the philosophy and science of consciousness?     Do we get an initial clarification, an essential step on the way to a theory of what it is to be conscious, from five leading ideas of consciousness? (Cf Ludwig 2003, 2-6) As leading ideas, they must be of some help. They are of qualia, what it is like to be something, subjectivity, intentionality or aboutness, and two kinds of consciousuness. 2  LEADING IDEAS Qualia     By many philosophers and scientists, this leading idea of consciousness is of what are called subjective qualities of experience. (Nagel, 2005, 775; Searle, 2002, 25-6, 39-40; Dennett, 1997, 619; Block, 1995a/1997/2007; Chalmers, 1996, 4-6; Van Gulick 2004, 16; Wright 2008)     What do qualia include? That is unclear, which it needs not to be. There is considerable disagreement. Mere examples are given from all of perceptual, affective and maybe reflective consciousness, nearly as uninstructive as a bare list of things can be. (Cf. Block 1995a/1997/2007, 380 in 1997)     What is it, called consciousness or experience, that has these qualities among others? That main question goes unanswered.     Qualia are evidently not sufficient for consciousness, since propositional attitudes in consciousness are not included in qualia.     Qualia are not really more paradigmatic or typical either, are they? No more salient than a brand new thought? They're somehow background, aren't they?     Qualia also inherit disabilities from several philosophical ancestors, say sense-data, one disdability being that they put each of us in solitary confinement. (Crane, 2000; Dretske, 2005; cf Robinson, 1994)     Qualia are generally presented as begging the physicality question or physicality questions about consciousness -- one way or the other. We can certainly do without that.     For these various reasons, it seems to me qualia give us no initial clarification of consciousness here.     But, despite this, talk and discussion of qualia contains simpler and stronger thoughts or impulses. They may come together with others in something arresting and indeed constraining.     A quale, we are told, is something you have -- all of it.     It is something experienced -- not just partly experienced.     It is, we hear, direct or immediate.     More generally, and it seems not truistically, it somehow exists.     Can we possibly disregard these seeming truths? What it is like to be something     What it is for a thing to be conscious, we are used to hearing, is there being something it is like to be that thing.     This possible initial clarification has to become, as Nagel says, and as his predecessor Sprigge implies, 'what it is like to be something for that thing'. (Nagel, 1974, 159-61, 167; Sprigge, 1971, 167) So the idea boils down to 'being conscious is there being something it is like to be conscious for or as that thing'. Circular and thus uniformative, it seems.     Another problem here is the insistence on the mysteriousness of consciousness, which exactly doesn't tell you what it is. Taking the idea a lot further has got attention but surely cannot help. (McGinn, 1989b, 1991, 1996, 1999)     Nor is there help in insistence on differences, including species-differences, within what it is like and being conscious.     Typically, as with Nagel, there is some begging of the question of physicality.     But the 'qualia freaks' do us a service. Despite the shortcomings, there are simpler thoughts or impulses here. They include some or all of those already mentioned.     Additionally, we have it that consciousness is such that something is for something else. That is right and telling too, isn't it? Subjectivity         Many ideas of subjectivity, via ideas of a subject, person, self, ego or homunculus, maybe dependence on it, make for circularity in being ideas of something conscious. (Cf Lowe, 1996)     So too does referring to dependence on experience itself. (Searle, 2002, 40-41)     Talk of privileged access in connection with subjectivity is uninformative. It does not say what the privileged access is to. (Cf Sosa 2003; Gertler, 2003 a, 2003b; Kim 1998, 16-19, 160-62)     Reliance on the idea of a point of view or perspective is vague when stretched from seeing things to all of consciousness, say the thought you are having. (Guzeldere, 1997, 24-6; Crane, 2001, 4-6; Tye, 1995)     Still, for all of that, consciousness is somehow effectively spoken of here in several of the ways already noticed with qualia and what it is like to be something.     Also, consciousness is said here to be such that something is self-presenting and the like. (Priest, 1991)     Further, it is such that something is open.     Do you think, in passing, that better can be done with subjectivity, that its difference from objectivity can be sharper, that it must have a place in any theory to which we come? I think so. Intentionality or Aboutness     Speaking, maybe with Brentano, of 'direction' to external objects or contents strikes me as no advance on a part of the commonsensical definition -- that consciousness is somehow about things. (Brentano, 1973 (1874), 77-88)     Direction to inner objects or contents -- i.e. objects or contents identified as in consciousness -- cannot be of real help. (Brentano, 1973 (1874), 77-88)     Direction to both inner and outer things has both the previous failings.     There is also the circularity of Brentano's talk of 'mental existence'.     Representation, put in place of direction, is generally taken not to be a fact of all consciousness, including all aches and general moods. It is also not a fact of only consciousness -- whatever has to be said of it in connection with one part of consciousness.     But, if it seems again that there is not really an initial clarification here, there certainly are more of what may be fruitful thoughts and impulses. Maybe more than with any other leading idea. (Crane, 2001, 2003, 2008)     Consciousness is understood as being such that something is presented.     It is something just present.     It is such that something is there. (Crane, 1995b, 1998a, 2001, 2008)     Something is given.     Something is before something else.     With respect to an initial clarification, do those ideas not ring a bell, maybe not a little bell?     Also, do you think better can be done with intentionality, that it must in some way have a large place or part or parts in any theory of which we come? I do. Two Kinds of Consciousness     There is much reference in our philosophy and science of consciousness to to what are called phenomenal and access consciousness, and in particular to the first. (Block, 1997a, 2007a; Chalmers, 1996; Armstrong, 1981)     Phenomenal consciousness is spoken of pretty loosely in terms of qualia, what it is like, and subjectivity. Maybe intentionality or aboutness, too. It therefore inherits the failings of those things. It is not at all clear that they compensate for one another when brought together.     Access consciousness so-called is typified by the dispositional fact that you knew your own name a minute ago, when, as we ordinarily say, it was not in your mind at all, when nothing of a relevant kind was in any way whatever being experienced by you . Access consciousness, to be brief, is therefore not ordinary consciousness at all. (Searle, 1992; Galen Strawson, 1994; Burge, 2007d; Goldman, 1997; Graham, 2007d; Lloyd, 2007d; Natsoulas, 2007d; Revonsuo, 2007d; Editorial Commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1995; Levine, 2007d; Block for replies, 2007a).     The two kinds of consciousness apparently leave out pure conscious thinking. In the theory of the two kinds, propositional attitudes do at least seem to be located in access rather than phenomenal consciousness. If that is not certain, we do anyway have a want of clarity that can hardly be instructive.     Access consciousness faces obstacles to the general theory of functionalism, of which something more will be said in the fourth section of this paper.     Still, putting aside what seem to be failings or problems, more or less all the somehow indicative thoughts and impulses mentioned with the four previous leading ideas also turn up in the accounts of phenomenal consciousness.     Also, something said of access consciousness in summary by Block, that it is 'poised for direct control of thought and action', reminds us that ordinary conscious in a still stronger sense is poised for use. It is somehow present and poised for use.     There is another point of interest. Chalmers is one strong philosopher who more or less equates the four preceding leading ideas of consciousness in characterizing phenomenal consciousness. (1996, 6, 9-11) Can this be other than reassuring with respect to the idea that those leading ideas have in them some common recommendation? Do they have in them some general and shared recommendation? 3  THOUGHTS AND IMPULSES     Is there an initial clarification of what it is to be conscious in the various converging thoughts and impulses in the above leading ideas -- and also in other places? Do they tell a tale, or rather a useful short story? Do they have the support of your own hold on your own consciousness now -- of the room, your thoughts, your feelings? That hold, you may think, is a final court of appeal for each of us, a court that sits over other argument and theory. Let me list these converging throughts and impulses together in the order in which they came up, sometimes with a word or two of amplification, and then make some significant additions to the list from elsewhere.     Being conscious in the primary ordinary sense is: something's being had, something all of it being had -- held, possessed or owned, something's being experienced -- met with, encountered, contacted or undergone, all of it, as in the case of each of the thoughts and impulses below (cf Dretske 2005b, 2005c), something's being direct or immediate something's somehow existing, there being something for something else, something's being self-presenting, self-confirming or self-intimating, something's being open -- all in view or on view, or open, something's being presented, something's being present, something being there, right there, (Crane, 2005) all of something being given -- something that consists in no more than what is given, something being before something else, something being poised, in fact on hand, as a potential cause or explanation or control of reasoning and action, something's being in a way provided or supplied,   something being to some extent a matter of privileged access, something known best by the conscious thing, (Kim, 1998a, 2005) there being, in perceptual consciousness, the world as it is for someone, (Martin, 1998b) something being close, as some say an ego is, (Metzinger, 1996, 13) something's being within awareness -- being at that time somehow perceived, something's being before something else, something's somehow being to something else, (Levine, 2001, 9) there being, in perceptual consciousness, the world as it is for someone, (Martin, 1998b) something being transparent, in the sense of being wholly seen without any medium being in between -- rather than seen through a just-discernible medium. (cf Moore, 1922, 17-20; Loar, 2003; Jackson, 2007)     Are you tempted to some summary of these items? Tempted to see one or two or a few as of general help, as encompassing others? Tempted to shorten the list of thoughts of being conscious, say, to all of something's being had, experienced, given, present, and there? Maybe tempted to divide the list into two sorts of things, one somehow epistemic and one somehow ontological? I will be trying on more than a summary soon -- an analysis or theory.     For the moment let me assume, as indeed I do, with enough confidence, that the list of things runs together or hangs together, that it is not a motley. They are also the content of immediate recall. They are data. They are the prime knowledge we have of our consciousness. They may be the main data for the science and philosophy of consciousness.     Let me put a fitting description on them, not try to do much more than that. Let me say that being conscious in the ordinary primary sense can be labelled and regarded as something's being actual.     I propose, as you will guess, that in the data and in the summary of it we have an initial clarification of ordinary consciousness.     If it were taken as no such thing, we would be being brave enough simply to disregard the thought of most of our fellow-workers, thought not bent by theory. Are these people all loose and careless talkers? If we were to dismiss the list, we would also have to disregard something larger, a shared body of thoughts and impulses not merely to be found in reflection and research on consciousness but also in the language of all of us and other work in it. Try the novel, maybe Anthony Trollope. Try autobiography. I can't say that I have, but I feel confident of the outcome.     Do the converging thoughts and impulses, and the description put on them in summary, make for an initial clarification of ordinary consciousness that is metaphorical, otherwise figurative, vague, and inchoate, rather than a literal one? Do you say something's being actual is a synedoche, a figure of speech in which a part is taken for the whole -- for a whole list -- since 'something's being actual' might have been in the list?     Yes of course the thoughts and impulses are metaphorical and so on, or anyway very nearly. Yes of course the summary is a synedoche. But compare the place or role of metaphor in the whole history of science, including main science, Greeks to Einstein, right up to Crick and Watson. Remember the atom, the gene, and all the rest. The place or role of figurative ideas is well known, and well studied. (Achinstein, Butterfield, Guttenplan 2005, Hesse, Kuhn, Keller, Leatherdale) So the fact of metaphor and other figurativeness, in my view, cannot be a real embarrassment.         Are the thoughts and impulses, what you might also call the collection of motifs or tacit agreements, in fact the collection of reported features or properties of consciousness, put in doubt by not having been attended to before now? Are they put in doubt by what you might call the novelty of a kind of collector's diligence?     The thoughts and feelings and summary are in fact a different expression of a reassuringly old idea. Descartes and Locke had it in the 17th Century. Descartes said 'There can be nothing in the mind, in so far as it is a thinking thing, of which it is not aware'. That it is possible to have something other than his idea of the mind, possible to be inclined to a\ different use of his term, does not affect his clear and obvious thought. I myself have no doubt whatever that an unbroken line of thinkers stands between Descartes and us. Have a look sometime.     But now let us go forward. Certainly we have a start, rather more than a start. It is that a decent theory of consciousness will above all be an answer to two questions about something's being conscious.     What is it that is actual?     What is it for this to be actual?     The primary criteria for a decent theory will be that it answers these questions -- answers them weith respect to each of perceptual consciousness, reflective consciousness and affective consciousness.      But there are secondary criteria, including four large criteria not too far behind. They come up naturally in connection with the existing theories of consciousness, including the dominant theory today in the science and philosophy of consciousness taken together, which is functionalism. Let us spend just a little time with it. 4   FUNCTIONALISM AND FOUR CRITERIA     For me, functionalism divides into two things. One of them, abstract functionalism, is the view, in short, that a conscious state is exactly no more than what is in causal relations with other conscious states conceived the same way and also other input as well as output of behaviour. We are pressed by almost all functionalists to understand just this.     The reason given is of course the proposition of multiple realizability. That, as is commonly said, is that a single type of conscious state, say pain, has or can have what are called different realizations, differently neural or different from neural, in different species or in computers or whatever. (Block, 1978/1980a/2007a, 1980b, 2007a)     It follows immediately from the proposition of multiple realizability, of course, that particular states, instances of the type, cannot be identified with any of their realizations. Pain has to be understood differently. In fact it has to be understood, as you have heard, as just the effect of tissue-damage etc and the cause of certain other conscious states, behaviour etc.     It is possible and maybe even customary not to keep this abstract functionalism really in focus. It is possible not to keep in mind that for this functionalism a conscious state has only the property or properties of being an effect-cause. It is worth keeping in mind that Block nearly says, nearly rightly in my view, that for abstract functionalism a mental and therefore a conscious state is 'entirely relational'. (2007a, 17)     So if you do have exactly abstract functionalism in mind, a conscious state is obviously not physical, in any of the existing or possible conceptions, of which there are quite a few, and a conscious state has no other character that might be called substantial or tangible or existential. It does not even have the spiritual character, something like ectoplasm, or just the character of being whatever it is that is immortal, assigned to conscious states by a few traditional dualists.     Another example than pain will be useful and maybe save us from something. Let c be my little token feeling of pleasure this morning at the sight of a wood in the early light. Let n1 be the somehow correlated neural state. Because c or anyway a perfect counterpart might have occurred along with the different state n2, c could not have been identical with n1. That is multiple realizability again -- a premise about which something else will be said later in another context. From the premise, the conclusion is drawn that c has to be taken as an instance of the type of state C, which is no more than an effect-cause. More plainly, the conclusion is drawn that c was only an effect-cause.     There are things to be said for abstract functionalism -- things that are also to be said for the traditional dualisms. (Foster, Meixner) Two large criteria are satisfied. Abstract functionalism makes being conscious different-in-kind from having other properties. That fact, which underlies striking and well-known attempted disproofs or scepticism of physicalism or uncertainty about it, is connected to another. (Searle, 1980, 1984; Block, 1978/1980a/2007a, 70-83; Jackson, 1982, 1986; Chalmers, 1996; Kirk, 2005)     The other large fact or facts of consciousness is what we call subjectivity, the subject of such relentless reference and affirmation. Abstract functionalism does not explain subjectivity, as of course any adequate theory of consciousness must do. But it does not exclude it. Abstract functionalism, like dualism, leaves a space. That is a recommendation.     Two large problems with abstract functionalism are that it fails with two other criteria as important. To be brief, conscious states are real. Yours began in a place and time and will end in one. Let me not pause to define that reality except to say that what is real must be at least be akin to the physical, including the objectively physical in one or another sense or more senses. Certainly it must take up or occupy space and time for a start.     There is a fact connected to the reality of consciousness. We all have to agree that conscious states are what all functionalism pays lip-service to, which is causal. They are effects and causes. But they aren't, paradoxically, for abstract functionalism. They can't be without the reality that abstract functionalism denies to them. In a word, the unreal isn't cause or effect of the real. Abstract functionalism, you can say, refutes itself.     There is a more particular argument to the same paradoxical conclusion, by the way. For abstract functionalism c was a cause, so-called, which can never give you or God or anything else an answer as to why something called its effect occurs. There is no answer whatever to be had with respect to that question about c because c had no other property -- there was no other fact about it. But causes are explanatory. That is what causes are. Abstract functionalism is as good as self-contradictory in its central proposition. So it seems to me.     Note in passing that if abstract functionalism were the truth about consciousness, and hence if consciousness were non-causal, consciousness would be both epiphenomenal and also outside of evolution. That consciousness is efficacious and was evolutionarily selected are lesser but essential criteria of a decent theory of it. Does anyone want a theory, either, by the way, that makes determinism immediately false by way of definition of consciousness? Any denial of determinism too that lets in some or a little causation? Not to mention whole libraries of psychology.     I said that in my view functionalism divides into two things. The second one is physical functionalism. In terms of the example, it does identify c and n1. The conscious state becomes neural, and hence somehow objectively physical. What can be said or assumed for this, of course, is that it supplies reality to c, and allows it to be a cause.     To be brief indeed about what you can anticipate from what was said in favour of abstract functionalism, physical functionalism fails on account of giving no difference-in-kind to consciousness and denying subjectivity.     That it not all, by the way. Here is another particular thought for you to consider. It could be that physical functionalism has more adherents than abstract functionalism, and that they do not think enough about it. It is more plainly self-contradictory than abstract functionalism. We have it that c = n1, a certain neural state. But c, by multiple realizability, could have occurred in the absence of n1, with some other different neural realization n2, not to mention a silicon state s -- and of course with c then identical with n2 or s.     Well, that seems to me to be physical functionalism up the spout. You can't have c identical with each of three non-identical things, n1 and n2 and s.      We have two large problems with abstract functionalism and two large problems with physical functionalism. There is another one, of course, at least one more. In terms of the example, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion, certainly impossible given our data about consciousness and the summary of it it, that abstract and physical functionalism, in short, just leave out the nature of consciousness, leaved out what we know.     Still, is there use for something else? Something like existing functional that can be thought of? We'll come to something useful that can be called ordinary functionalism when we come back for a moment to multiple realizability in connection with a very different theory of consciousness. 5   OTHER CRITERIA     In order to think about other secondary criteria for a theory of consciousness, it would be agreeable to have time to look at other existing theories than the functionalisms. (Flanagan, 1992; Heil, 1995; Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson 1996; Seager, 1999; Guttenplan, 2000; Lowe 2000; Sturgeon; Blackmore 2004; Campbell 2005; Ravenscroft 2005; Eckert 2006; ) Two ruling ideas already mentioned also count as theories themselves -- intentionality and two kinds of consciousness. Intentionality, I take it, has physicalist and non-physicalist versions.     So too with theories of supervenience, by the way, which include partly non-physicalist ones. Kim's recent book (2005) is partly non-physicalist. A question arose quite a while ago about Davidson's Anomalous Monism, given his failure to define mentality and thus consciousness. (1970) Both are different in this respect from something now to be left in the past, the Union Theory of mind and brain. (Honderich, 1988, 2004d, 2004e)     But on this occasion let me change gears and not spend time on theories and their contained criteria. Let me just list some other secondary criteria in addition to those having to do with two questions and with difference-in-kind, subjectivity, reality, and causal role.     A decent theory must must not only make conscious different-in-kind, but explain the manifest differences between the three parts, kinds, sides or elements within consciousness. If that needs argument, which I doubt, it cannot have it here. There is the assumption of difference in an awful lot of psychology, loads of it. There is also that final court of appeal mentioned earlier, your hold on your own consciousness.     A decent theory must include or allow for a satisfactory answer to what has the best claim to the name of the mind-body problem (Lycan, 2003; Ludwig, 2003), and also the more presupposing question about the generation of consciousness by the brain or the like -- this having the name of being the hard problem, at least close to what is named the explanatory gap. (Jackson; Levine, cf Van Gulick)      A decent theory should at least make sense of and satisfy whatever reasonable demand there is for an 'intelligible' rather than a 'brute' connection between brain or whatever and consciousness.     A decent theory must consort with science, to say the very least. In my view, nothing that goes against neuroscience and empirical psychology in particular can be hopeful. That excludes, of course, what you can kindly call philosophical neuroscience.     Intentionality or aboutness must be given some considerable place or places.     So with your extent of your privileged access to your own conscious states.     Also privacy, which is not the same.     A good theory will also recognize something else not usually mentioned. That is our common uncertainty about internalism or cranialism as against kinds of externalism or anti-individualism. That is an uncertainty evidenced by your having no confident answer to the question 'Is your consciousness inside your head?'      Is the state of state of thinking and research on consciousness such that something entirely new and different is needed?  Some say so. 6   ACTUALISM: PERCEPTUAL, REFLECTIVE AND AFFECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS  6a  Perceptual Consciousness     What is actual in your being perceptually conscious right now? What is had, experienced, given, present, for you, there, and so on?     Neural activity, soggy grey matter, is not a conceivable answer, not up to the level of hopeless. Nor is dualist spirit, or anything just abstract.     The immediate and surely indisputable answer to the question is a room. The answer to what is actual, if an answer that needs attention and needs distinguishing from what some may call the room, is a room. That is something which, if it exists, has various properties. It is something which, if it exists, has various predicates true of it. There may be the predicate 'has chairs and people in it' for a start.     With respect to your awareness of the room, to repeat, neurons aren't actual -- however they are related to your consciousness, which of course they are, closely. Nor is any of the stock in trade of objective physicalism, old or new. No 17th Century particles or the stuff of 20th Century strong philosophy (Dennett, 1987, 1992) or scientific advance by way synchronous oscillations in the 40 to70 Hz range. (Koch & Crick, 1990) No 21st Century further thinking (Papineau, 2002; Tye 2009). No mystery from the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. (Lockwood; Pylkkanen, 2007; Smith & Jokic, 409-525)     Nor, to repeat, is anything actual that does not occupy or take up space and time. Nothing whatever is actual that can give suitable content, albeit against its own official self-description or self-denial, to abstract functionalism.     A lot of other things noted in our leading ideas aren't actual. No qualia or sense-data, where those are of course different in kind from properties of a room out there, are actual. I can tell the difference between images and the like and other things, and I trust you can. No inner 'what-it's-likeness' is actual. Nor a self or subject or homunculus or homunculi. (Cf Cassam; Galen Strawson 2009a) Nor any fact or character of directedness or aboutness. No representations. And of course nothing just poised but not present.     Also not actual is any just-discernible medium, half-espied by Moore after he was first to think of transparency or diaphanousness. Not actual either is an act as distinct from an object, or any like pair of things, or of course anything called the hidden or inner structure of consciousness. (McGinn, 1982, 1991, 2004) Nor something additional to a room, which is a higher-order thought. (Rosenthal, 1991)     To take a few minutes on something else that may not be actual with respect to your awareness of this room, there is a staple or staples of much recent philosophy. That is content. (Peacocke 1983, 1986; McGinn, 1989a, 1991, 1996)     No doubt there is some reading to be done by me here, but in advance I suppose or hazard the guess that there are three possibilities. If in your present case the spoken-of content is a room, then the content-philosophers are welcome aboard our theory. If it is unsettled by them what content is, then I take it there is no theory of consciousness on offer. If content, thirdly, is a screen or curtain or tableau of interior things, I think we will need a far better argument for this survival of the doctrine of phenomenalism into the 21st Century than has ever been provided in its history.     I mention in passing only a last good argument in the 20th Century for phenomenalism, by Ayer. To boil its crucial part down too far, he says we don't see that Locke's tower or the coin or whatever is what (a) is also seen by other persons, (b) can be sensed by more senses other than sight, and (c) can exist unperceived -- properties taken as defining a physical or objective thing. The reply is that it really doesn't follow that we don't see what has those three properties. (Honderich, 1991)     Something else is usually added to the content story, by the way, and it needs to be added in order to explain what is common between seeing the room and whatever else. That is a vehicle for the content. Well, vehicles aren't had, experienced, given, present, for us, there or anything of the kind.     Hume, you may remember, should have been nearer to this whole line of thought in failing to espy his self when he looked inside. But he then succeeded in espying his ideas -- those predecessors of sense-data and qualia -- and so, in my judgement and maybe yours, went badly astray, and led others into a kind of confusion, a mislocation of things, one of two mislocations.     The first has to do with the fct that of course the collection of things supposedly within consciousness, but really not there, is not invention. When you are perceptually conscious, say aware of the room, you can as a student of consciousness flash in a moment or the moment to something else, somewhere else, so to speak -- thought and feeling, reflective and affective consciousness. You can ask or wonder if you discern something other than a room of the so-far indicated kind, be obscurely curious, have uncertain or stray inclintions about conscious activity within consciousness, and maybe the unity of consciousness. You can wonder about qualia and a medium and content in some elusive sense and so on.     None of that, I suggest, is of the order of the fact of something's being actual with perceptual consciousness. A room now with yours. No other fact is so clear, strong and unavoidable. Not merely more salient but rather the effective sum of your being perceptually aware. But the second fact of mislocation is larger.     Of course we can agree that a collection of things and also a lot of philosophical and scientific work, said to be in or on consciousness itself, while it is not that, are in or true of something. They are good thinking about something else -- in short about what goes with consciousness. This is thinking and research on the basis or bases or correlates or causes of consciousness. Let me repeat strongly: all that thinking and research isn't really error. It's speculation on a subject that isn't ours, a subject not well designated. not well designated. It is thinking not about the consciousness problem but about the body side of the mind-body problem.     So much for our first question -- about what is actual when we are perceptually aware. Now the second. If your perceptual consciousness is such that a room is actual, what is it for it to be actual? What is it for anything to be actual in perceptual consciousness? What is it for anything to be had, experienced, and so on, somehow to exist, to be to you, to be known best, to be there, to be there without a medium in between? That is our second question.     The answer about your perceptual consciousness now, it seems to me, is and has to be that what it is for a room to be actual is simply for that room to exist.     It is for it to exist in a defined sense, and no more than that. We can make a start on the sense by following something like but not the same as Quine's idea that to be is to be the value of a variable, that to say something exists is to employ the existential quantifier. (1953b) We say instead that what it is for something to be actual is for there to be something that is spatio-temporal which has certain properties.     What properties? We have one set in mind already -- properties of a room, chairs and people in it and so on.The other two sets of properties are related to them, if very different, and quite as important. The whole story of existence is that what it is for you to be aware of a room is (a) for there to be something spatio-temporal that (b) has properties of a room, but also (c) is dependent on a physical world underneath, say a world of physics or of particles in fields of force, and (d) is also dependent on you neurally. All four propositions are necessary conditions.     If a room in the cases of your room and my room are indubitably out there, out there in space, not in anyone's head or mind, of course neither of them is the objective physical world or an objective physical world -- a physical world as generally understood in philosophy and science. They can't be, for a start, because your room and my room are not identical, and hence neither can be identical with a physical world.     A remark in passing. It should be plain that your being aware of the room is not being explained circularly -- not being explained as there being a world of which you are aware or conscious. Your being aware of the room is exactly a room's existing in the specified way.     It should be plain, too, that your perceived world is not just a mental world or a consciousness-dependent world in any sense inconsistent with or troublesome to the theory. I am not sure what that sense would be -- maybe the sense in abstract functionalism -- but no matter. Your perceived world is not made mental by its dependence not only on a physical world underneath but also on the person you neurally are. The physical world in another good sense or sense, indeed several, where it is coloured and so on, and has iron, cars and elephants in it, is certainly not made mental or whatever in any troublesome sense by its being partly dependent on all of us or a consensus of us. Human vision, its contribution so well studied, doesn't make it other than a physical world.     Pause for a bit. You have heard quite a few worlds being mentioned or implied, and maybe you are getting a little uneasy. You have heard of the world as it is for someone, perceived worlds, physical worlds, objective physical worlds, and the physical world underneath or the world of particles in fields of force.     Quite a few more can be added. There is the world of primary but not secondary qualities. There is the world of physics, or the world of unified science in which physics is privileged, or the partly unpredictable and so pretty dodgy world of physics now and still to come, or the entities and relations in the physical and biological sciences, all of which leave out cars and elephants. There is the world of mind-independent reality. Also the world in the view from nowhere. (Nagel, 1986)     There is the world too of unperceived space-occupiers such as atoms but also perceived space occupiers such as chairs in lawlike connection with the atoms. There is what is somehow perceived by all of us or and has a dependency on all of us, or anyway on an accredited group of us -- it is important to me that this is definitely not the same as any particular perceived world, says yours or mine. These several characterizations have the recommendation of letting cars and elephants and the rest into the physical world somehow conceived.     If it is necessary for your relief, let me say quickly about all this large matter of the physical, which needs more attention than it can have here. (Cf Crane & Mellor) At bottom there is just one reality, one world. This one reality, however we are to think of it, is open to different categorizations, categorizations of all or parts or levels of it. The categorizations produce the worlds I have been talking about. The rhetoric has seemed to me useful, in fact essential. But they are worlds in no deeper a sense than that in which there are the worlds of particles in fields of force or of sport or fashion.     What is most important, to go on forward, is that there are objective and there are subjective ones. The subjective ones so far in view are our perceived worlds. They are subjective, as you have heard, in (1) the sense that each one is partly dependent on a particular person or organism or conscious thing.     But (2) There is the connected and much larger or more significant fact that each is subjective in that each is different. No perceived world, whatever the theoretical possibilities, is identical to any other one. And, quite as important, no perceived world is identical to any objective world, say the world of physics. If these are familiar facts, their size and importance has certainly not been given sufficient attention.     So what we have got, in so far as perceptual consciousness is concerned, can rightly have the name of being a subjective physicalism. The theory reduces perceptual consciousness to what occupies space and time, externally to the person or thing in question, and has the mentioned dependencies both on a world underneath and on the thing that is perceptually conscious. It is unique. There is sense enough in saying a perceived world is mine.       The theory in question, of which there are two more parts to come, about reflective and affective consciousness, can be called Actualism. It was once called Radical Externalism to distinguish it from the quite different meaning-externalisms of Putnam and Burge. (Putnam, 1967, 1975, 1975a, 1975b; Burge, 1986, 2007a; cf Segal, 2007, & Noe, 2004) It has also had the name of being Consciousness As Existence, for reasons tht will become more apparent when we also have reflective and affective consciousness in view. But time has marched on, with thinking about names in it.     One last comment about the view we have of perceptual consciousness. It is certainly not Naive or Direct Realism. The latter is the theory that the fact of being conscious, your being conscious, has in it a discernible relation to physical things, something like directedness. For Direct Realism, being conscious is somehow having the property of being aware of an external thing. That isn't Actualism. But Actualism does face an objection that also faces Direct Realism.     It is the long-running argument from hallucination or the like. A proposition in reply to the objection is a form of what has become known as Disjunctivism. In a very fast sentence, what happens when you hallucinate is only that you think you see, not that you do something you also do when you do see. There aren't qualia or sense-data there -- ready to rear up counterparts in seeing. (Snowdon; 1980, 1990, 2005; Martin, 2002) One difference between my proposition in reply to the argument from hallucination and Disjunctivism's reply is that the proposition is not what can seem an ad hoc rejoinder to the argument from hallucination. Rather it is a proposition that has a home in an arguable general theory of consciousness. There is mutual support.     There is also a kind of argument different from the one from hallucination -- and a reply to it. You still see a thing itself if you see it from different angles. That it looks different doesn't refute Naive or Direct Realism -- or Actualism, which I repeat is very different. Nor are they refuted by the thing's looking smaller as it gets further away, or taking up less of your visual vield, or if it is seen in a distorted way in water, or in the way it looks if you have jaundice, or just have eye problems. It is still seen if you stick your finger in your eye and, as we can also say, see two things. (Crane) All of these facts make it clear that we have to think about what it is to be a physical object. They don't, I take it, make real trouble for Actualism. 6b  Reflective Consciousness     It is my own idea that the account given of perceptual consciousness is basically correct. It is hard to feel the same confidence about an account of reflective consciousness. The way any world, or any piece of any world, gets into reflective consciousness is entirely different from the way in which a perceived world is actual in perceptual consciousness. So with what we have been taught to call any possible world or piece of one. This at least includes, of course, the problem of representation.     Reflective consciousness is thinking and the like in a wide sense, as against seeing and the like and feeling and the like in wide senses. Reflective consciousness consists in one of the two large categories of propositional attitudes. These are not at all somehow relegated to down below, to the functioning of the unconscious mind, to access consciousness, as they seem to be by some of our fellow workers. (Cf Galen Strawson, 2009b, 197-205)     A taxonomy of reflective consciousness is not easy, partly because one's candidate families, genera and species fail infuriatingly by overlapping. Let me not struggle with the problem here but merely make a few comments. The reflective attitudes include, for a start, attention to things in perceived worlds, which attention has been the subject of a good deal of philosophy and psychology. (Fodor, 1968, 1975, 1990, 2001) They also include the many and different ways in which we think about things not in perceived worlds. They also include dreaming, remembering and the higher-order stuff of inquiry and judgement.     The propositional attitudes in question are those of some epistemic form that at bottom is the effect that it is true that something has a property. (Honderich, 1968) The stuff of these attitudes, their matter rather than their form so to speak, is the main question about them for us. They are bound up with a language of thought and also other language, such as English. Also, however, they certainly seem certainly to be a matter of those items once condescended to, mental images. (Hannay, 1971)     One  general and familiar conjecture is that they involve representations, along with something else, say direction onto the representations, or a vehicle for them, or whatever. The conjecture in the present theory is certainly different.     It is that these attitudes consist in nothing more than representations. In this way reflective consciousness is a counterpart to perceptual consciousness. Actuality is just an existence. Both perceptual and reflective consciousness are simpler than they are usually taken to be. Also differently from the familiar conjecture, the representations are both external and internal. They include real signs, spatial signs, in worlds of perceptual consciousness and they also include internal signs. Also. most fundamentally to this part and to our whole line of thoughts about consciousness, they are subjectively physical.     To say that reflective consciousness consists in representations is indeed to face the general question of what representations are. (Sterelny, 1990; Stich & Warfield, 1994; Tye, 1995) We hear that representations are things that are effects of what they represent, an idea that faces much obvious difficulty. To say consciousness is representations is also partly to say, maybe, that it consists in things that share effects with what is represented, an idea that faces less difficulty. The cry 'Fire!' does share effects with fire. It seems at least as good an idea.     What Actualism comes to here, then, is that my thinking of the look of my father, by way of an internal or external sentence or image, maybe a photograph, is such that what is actual is a representation. Its being actual, to come to the second question, and to answer it in this sentence, is only its existing.     The whole story here, evidently, is not like the story of perceptual consciousness -- as it would be if it was the story that what is represented rather than the representation is actual. The story we do have or something like it is needed in order to record the fundamental difference between seeing something and thinking about it later. But almost all of the stuff excluded from perceptual consciousness, starting with neurons and including content in certain senses, is as much excluded from the reflective side of consciousness     The subjectivity of your reflective consciousness is, so to speak, greater than the subjectivity of your perceptual consciousness, despite the subjectivity of reflective consciousness being importantly dependent on the subjectivity of perceptual consciousness. To say your thinking is different from mine, and from any general or shared language or conceptual scheme, is to understate the uniqueness of your thinking. The size and solidity of this fact goes a long way to make it much of the reality of subjectivity despite, so to speak, the fact's want of depth of mystery -- its want of a traditional self and so on. 6c  Affective Consciousness     A taxonomy of affective consciousness is perhaps as difficult as that of reflective consciousness, for the same reasons. It certainly has in it sensations, desires, emotions, valuings, other attitudes, and intentions both active and also forward-looking or inactive.     What can be said of it in general here, on the wing, is that in form it consists of the other large category of propositional attitudes. They are, very generally speaking, desires as against beliefs. These, we can say, are at bottom to the effect that it is good that something has a property. Actions and their properties are of course a part of this.     Affective consciousness, like reflective consciousness, has much to do with things in perceived worlds, but the relationship is different in kind from attention or bare attention. This is clear enough with want, feeling, and intention, and it is as clear with valuing. If we somehow project values onto a world, (Blackburn, 1993) that is because it has things in it -- the safe as against the dangerous, the kindly and the ugly, and so on. Affective consciousness as we know it, in short, is inconceivable in the absence of perceptual consciousness.     Here again the matter of the attitudes, what they consist in as distinct from their form, is representations. These are both external representations in perceived worlds and also internal representation. That is all that affective consciousness consists in. It does not include, for a start, any fact of direction onto the representations.     What it is for representations to be actual, as you will anticipate, is simply for them to exist, where that again is partly a matter of dependencies and more a matter of their uniqueness -- of which physical subjectivity a little more will be said about all the three sides of consciousness in due course.     One postscript of interest can be added to these mere remarks on the propositional attitudes of both reflective and affective consciousness -- remarks that of course leave questions unanswered and work to be done. The postscript, promised earlier, is about something like functionalism.     Functionalists, you will remember, depend on the fundamental premise of multiple realizability. They necessarily intend and imply, what curiously they do not assert in speaking of pain, that such a type of state of consciousness consists in identical instances of pain, perfect counterparts. There would be no point in saying that it is just different token conscious states that go with different neural realizing states. That could not necessitate or even prompt the thought that you cannot understand a conscious state as being a a particular neural state, and that therefore a type of conscious state has to be understood in terms of its causal relations.    All of which leads towards the contradiction in physical functionalism -- when the instances are identified with different physical or other states.     You can think of something different in place of functionalism's fundamental premise. It is that a type of state of consciousness, say pain again, consists in only similar instances. Here there is the possibility of taking the instances to be differently physical without contradiction. As a result, we can have a further characterization of pain in our Actualism. Pains are what come from kinds of damage etc and result in kinds of behaviour etc. Reflective and affective consciousness, consistent with their own intrinsic natures as something's being actual, can be further explained by these causal connections. 7   SATISFYING THE CRITERIA     There are groups of philosophers who include within their criteria of a good theory of consciousness that it is a physicalism, or reductionism, or naturalism -- each of these being more things than one. Maybe realism should also be mentioned. Many or all of the foregoing kinds of theories are taken as superior to metaphysics These general criteria of theories of more than consciousness are are not so immediate as others, those tied to consciousness itself. In some forms they certainly they are more disputable than the particular criteria.     Physicalism. Actualism is for good reason a physicalism in certain relevant senses. Consciousness is physical in the sense simply of being in the world of space occupiers, in the world of primary and secondary properties with the latter understood partly in terms of perceived worlds, the world of unperceived space occupiers in lawlike connetion with things in perceived worlds. Consciousness is about as much as cars and elephants in other physics-related worlds.     Reductionism. Actualism is also at least partly a reductionism of a kind, or several reductionisms. One simply is the physicalism that it is. Also, what it is to be perceptually conscious, as traditionally conceived in philosophy, is reduced to something in another domain, a domain external to heads. Also, the representations of reflective and affective consciousness include external ones in perceived worlds.     Naturalism in the literature is indeed more things than one. To move past a lot to what seems to be the primary understanding, what is natural is what is what is open to the methods of the natural sciences. That cannot be understood, if there is to be a useful idea, as making naturalism into physicalism. (Papineau, 1993) Nor does it need to be so understood. Actualism indubitably is a naturalism -- but I will return to natural science in a minute.     We could think about adding realism in a very general sense to this list of general criteria. Realism with respect to kinds of possible things, let us say, led by a good guide, is affirming their independent existence in each case as that kind and as subjects of truth, or, as you might say, reflective consciousness. (Blackburn, 1996) It is clear enough that Actualism can be said to be an instance of realism, and abstract functionalism to fail to be one.     Whatever your view of metaphysics, I submit Actualism is no more metaphysical than other philosophy and science of consciousness. They too are concerned with and assert fundamental categories of what exists. (Lowe, 2002) The difference between Actualism and most other forms of physicalism is that the latter are not subjected to reflection in the same way.     I come now to all the particular criteria we have assembled.         Two questions. Actualism answers the two questions, no doubt because they shaped it. The questions themselves followed from the initial clarification of consciousness. So Actualism can seem to follow indisputably, anyway on a good day, from the initial clarification of ordinary consciousness. On a very good day, it puts me in mind of Hume, who said that if you accept his premises, you are stuck with his conclusions.     Can other theories than Actualism possibly be rewritten into answers to the two questions? Physicalism other than physical functionalism? Intentionalism? The component of access consciousness in the theory of two kinds of consciousness rules the theory out, certainly. So too, I take it, are the functionalisms ruled out. But I leave these questions.     Reality. Actualism does indeed make consciousness a particular reality. In fact it makes it, as you know, physical in a clear and relevant way. It has the recommendation of doing so while at least arguably preserving the diffrence-in-kind and the subjectivity of consciousness.     Causal role. Actualism allows for causal connection between being conscious and the rest of the physical. Certainly there can be causal relations between realities at different levels and of different kinds, different categorizations of reality. It is a commonplace, even in the newspapers. Say the worlds of sport and fashion. It is familiar in reflection on science, and in other theories of consciousness. Searle's is an example. (1992)     Difference-in-kind. Actualism makes a difference-in-kind between being conscious and other states. It is the difference between being subjectively physical and objectively physical. More does need to be said of what is subjective, certainly. Let me say a little right now.     Subjectivity. Actualism gives a unique and uniquely substantal account of subjectivity. All theories of consciousness, whatever their conceptual and terminological habits, have to and do give some place or other to our conviction that being conscious is somehow both different-in-kind and subjective. Even eliminative materialism has to and does. (Churchland, 1988, 1995) The crucial requirement, however, to speak quickly, is to give the conviction a place or size that suits it.     What Actualism does is to make your being perceptually conscious, to speak only of that, into a world that is different from all others, different from everything else. But that is not all. The theory makes our being perceptually conscious into worlds that can rightly be taken as the primary worlds. It is not objective worlds that are primary but rather our subjective worlds. The reasons for saying so are clear enough, and in part familiar.     First, to recapitulate, their dependence on us does not deprive them of the shared primacy of physicality. They are as much in space and time as the world of physics and the like. Secondly, they are indeed perceived rather than only theorized worlds. Thirdly, the perceived worlds are worlds that test the theorized worlds -- more than or as much as the theorized worlds test them. All the final data is in the perceived worlds. Finally, perceptual worlds are the worlds in which we live -- the only worlds in which we live in the sense in question. It is they that have in them everything else but theory that makes our existence what it is.     It is important, indeed crucial, that these remarks about perceptual consciousness have counterparts with respect to reflective and affective consciousness.     Actualism, in short, surely does more to explain and satisfy our convictions and their size or weight of the difference-in-kind and subjectivity of consciousness -- Actualism surely does more than the exististing theories it seeks to join and indeed replace.         The three parts, kinds, sides or elements of consciousness. This criterion has not been considered and defended as much by me here as the inattention to it in the science and philosophy of consciousness suggests is necessary. Looking back, the five leading ideas of consciousness had little to say of the differences, which surely call out for registration and explanation in an adequate theory.     By way of one remark, both psychology and philosophy have a history of distinguishing between the problems of perception, thinking and motivation. Psychology and philosophy, then, have already recognized what we all know, that your now being aware of the room, before any analysis of the fact is given, is indeed quite unlike thinking about somewehere else or about a theorem or having an intention to do something tomorrow. Certainly there is a general question of consciousness. Certainly it has three parts requiring different answers.     The mind-body problem. According to Actualism, other thinking and research, anyway in its general assumptions and generalizations, didn't get the whole basis of consciousness right. It didn't get all the bases in. It put the mind-body problem in place of a wider problem. It also did that with the more presupposing question about the generation of consciousness by the brain or the like -- this having the name of being the hard problem.     The other thinking and research contributed to but couldn't possibly be wholly right about the whole explanatory basis, since an externalism is forced upon us by an initial clarification of consciousness.     The demand for an 'intelligible' rather than a 'brute' connection between brain and consciousness. What is the sense in the demand for an 'intelligible' or 'understandable' connection between the basis of consciousness and consciousness? That is not clear.     There is nothing more illuminating about one real lawlike link as against any other real lawlike link, and explanation consists in such links. Certainly there are new links, discovered links that are real news, but no links that give off a special light in any other sense.     In general, lawlike connections are at least mainly made clearer by supplying intermediate lawlike connections. An A-E connection becomes clearer when we find out that it is the A-B, B-C, C-D, and D-E connection. That is ordinary real illumination. It seems not to be the sort of thing asked for by the demanders of intelligibility.     I speculate that the contemplated unintelligibility of the brain-consciousness connection somehow comes down to two things, the first mentioned earlier in connection with what it is like to be something -- the mysteriousness of consciousness. If Actualism is arguable, there isn't that original mysteriousness.     The second ground of the unintelligibility, I take it, is the separable and familiar proposition that brain and consciousness are dramatically different. (McGinn, 1991, 1) But true theories of two things very often don't have somehow similar things in them -- ordinary causal connections don't have to be between anything at all similar. Think of an explosive and the explosion for a start.     But does similarity somehow help in a theory? As in the case of heat and molecular motion? I don't see how, but maybe it is so.     Whatever is said along such lines comes to, Actualism presumably has a recommendation. Without lingering longer here, remember that the difference between, say, your perceptual consciousness now, consisting in a room, and its bases, including the room underneath, is certainly reduced in Actualism. Your being perceptually conscious is understood, for a good start, as a state of affairs based in a lower physical world. In general there are similarities between the lower physical world and your perceived world.     Science. Actualism neither denies nor replaces nor upstages in any way any neuroscience or psychology or cognitive science. It consorts with all relevant science, if not all the philosophy in it. (Honderich, 1988, 71-208, 301-4; Honderich, 2005d) It leaves everything of consciousness itself and also its physicality-relations as subjects of science -- and of the philosophy that is a concentration on logic. (Cf Chalmers, 2009, 17-20) Actualism is quite as good as traditional physicalism in this respect.     One incidental good effect of the theory, taken as true, is that it frees science from its residual uncertainty about consciousness. That is the uncertainty that it is somehow missing a subject, even the main subject. The uncertainty goes with worry about dualism and maybe can be expressed as the notion, say, that consciousness is somehow an aura over the brain. I suspect abstract functionalism, because of a suspicion about it that I have tried to turn into a refutation, has not been wholly reassuring either.     Actualism about consciousness, to repeat, makes all of consciousness a subject for science. Furthermore, the truth of Actualism in so far as it concerns perceived worlds carries the consequence that science has actually gone much further in the investigation of consciousness than it has supposed. Scientific work on consciousness itself is not in its infancy. Nothing like. For a start, perceived worlds and their dependencies are established subjects in several ways.     It would indeed be absurd to think that all the research into consciousness, notably neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and the like, was anything like a waste of time. That prejudice is nonsense. What was mistaken with all of it was only that it conceived itself to be inquiry into consciousness as distinct from what it was into, which was consciousness and its basis, sometimes just part of its basis.     Reluctance about consciousness within the head -- pure cranialism. Actualism says the right answer to the location question is its mixed one. It recognizes our common uncertainty about internalism or cranialism as against kinds of externalism -- as remarked earlier, an uncertainty evidenced by your having no confident answer to the question 'Is your consciousness inside your head?' It gives what suits and explains the uncertainty -- the mixed or less simple truth about perceptual as against reflective and affective consciousness.     Intentionality or aboutness. Actualism gives it a large place in reflective and affective consciousness.     Privileged access. An account of this is intrinsic to Actualism, in particular in the subjectivity of its physicalism. There is a familiar beginning of an account in the unique dependency in Actualism of my consciousness on me. There is also the fact, unique to Actualism, that what is actual in perceptual cnsciousness, a perceived world, is indeed actual -- in particular open, self-presenting, presented, close, and so on. There is no connection within perceptual consciousness to your perceived world, no connection that can be mistaken or fail. There are like facts with the existence of the two kinds of propositional attitudes in reflective and affective consciousness.      No doubt there is some self-indulgence in a postscript, less serious, but maybe worth adding. It is often enough said, as you heard earlier, that the philosophy of mind needs a new theory of consciousness. (Haldane, 1994) It has been said  'we need to kick our theorizing into a higher gear, because the mind will not submit to purblind attempts to cut it down to size. ... ...whenever a view is held by one's contemporaries to be absolute anathema that is the time to look at it seriously. ... ...we should be aiming rather for the shock on the new....' (McGinn, 2004, 3, 138) 8   THE RIGHT SUBJECT?     What is the importance of the propositions that there is data to the effect that ordinary consciousness is something's being actual, and that what that comes to it is a subjective physicalism, both externalist and internalist, just the existing of perceived worlds and the existing of representations in two kinds of propositional attitudes? In short, are these conclusions on the right subject? Was ordinary consciousness the right subject?     Well, for me the propositions on consciousness as something's being actual have the importance of truth, or arguableness, or anyway of getting out of some confusion. They are true answers to two well-formed questions, or, in the worst case, which is better than some others, false answers to well-formed questions that can persist. They have to my mind more or less survived the attention of a collection of good critics, taken aback though they were by something admittedly different (Freeman, 2006), but not so struck by it as another (McGinn, 2007; Honderich, 2007).     As for other theories, say that of two kinds of consciousness, there can be no objection to considering consciousness together with its basis or bases. No more objection than ever considering effect together with cause or correlate with correlate or conceptually-connected items -- say temperature and pressure for a start. Of course you can introduce a stipulative definition of consciousness, as Block does. That is not of the greatest importance. What is more important, of course, is that he and others are better placed than still others of us to consider two subjects.     Can there be any objection to considering consciousness separately, as we have? You can indeed say that consciousness and basis, or rather bases, are both explanatory of behaviour, which obviously is true. So what? Why should they be considered together?     Any general idea or injunction here here would prohibit you from inquiring, say, just into the economic causes of war, or the contribution of a government to unemployment or depression. The idea that we must always consider all of a sufficient condition or causal circumstance for anything would close a lot of university departments. Does the idea owe something to uncertainty about the nature of causation and causal explanation? (Mackie, 1974; Honderich, 1988, 13-70)     Are there more reasons for considering consciousness separately? None are needed. But I guess we can answer, in a way anticipated earlier, that ordinary consciousness as against its bases stands in unique connection with human life: the great human goods, ethics, personal relations, responsibility and credit. Also, consciousness demands separate attention in being of the greatest importance to the rest of the mental, to the acquisition of those capabilities, to the existence of these mental functions     Finally, consciousness is more of a subject in Actualism than in any other theory of it -- it includes in it what you might call primary reality, perceived worlds. They are the source of and the foundation of all the other ones. References Achinstein, Peter, 1991, Particles and Waves: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Science. Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press. 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